Last year we showed you how to create a myriad of artistic styles in Adobe's vector art tool. Here are the ones you've loved most -- from character art and summery scenes to tattoos and patterns.

Tune in tomorrow for our list of the 2010's most popular in-depth guides.

Add depth to your art with expert shading techniquesWith all the tools and effects that Adobe Illustrator has to offer, it can sometimes be hard to achieve a sense of depth and atmosphere within your images. Often they can come out looking flat and very two-dimensional. In this tutorial, Bristol-based artist Ben Steers will show you how he uses gradient effects and opacity masks to overcome this, as he takes you through how he created his piece, Gone Karting.

Create summery poster artwork using Illustrator CS5Adobe's Creative Suite 5 has recently arrived, and with it comes a new version of Illustrator, featuring some exciting tools. To give you a flavour of them, we asked Ben the Illustrator to put Illustrator CS5 to the test. He uses it to create a summery poster, as given free with the June issue of Digital Arts.

Create quirky repeating patternsImakethings (known to his mum as Andrew Groves) shows you how to make a repeat pattern based on map-like imagery. He uses simple shapes and icons to illustrate geographical features from a bird’s-eye point of view similar to those used in OS maps.

Design a geometric op-art posterThis tutorial explains how to create one of Simon C Page’s seemingly complicated posters via some nifty tricks in Illustrator and InDesign CS5. Like most of his more intricate designs, he created this using Flash Professional CS5’s ActionScript language – but here he shows you how to do it in Illustrator, using that application’s ExtendScript toolkit.